As our world becomes ever-increasingly connected, the importance of data access is likewise ever increasing. Merely by way of example, a current focus of the computer industry is in the field of “enterprise search,” in which a single search facility (e.g., a search server, a distributed search service, etc.) can provide search capabilities across a variety of computers on an enterprise network. Merely by way of example, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g™, available from Oracle Corp., provides the ability to search and locate public, private and shared content across a variety of enterprise data sources, including without limitation intranet web servers, databases, files on users' local disks and/or file servers, email message stores, document management systems, applications and portals.
However, enterprise users have an increasing number of mobile computing options, which provide the abilities for users to store data on mobile devices, which traditionally have not had visibility to enterprise search services, due in part to their transient nature. Merely by way of example, many users have handheld email devices (such as the Blackberry™ from Research in Motion, Ltd. and other such devices) on which they store important data, including without limitation documents, electronic mail messages, portable databases, and the like. Similarly, many wireless phones (such as CDMA phones, GSM phones, and the like) have become capable of storing similar data. Personal digital assistants (“PDA”) are also capable of storing such data—some PDAs are network-connected (e.g., support Internet protocol (“IP”) communications via cellular links, 802.xx links and/or the like), while others are not (i.e., require a connection, such as Bluetooth, serial, or universal serial bus (“USB”) to a PC in order to exchange data). (These devices, collectively, are described herein as “mobile devices,” a term that should be interpreted to include any handheld device capable of storing data and communicating, either directly or via a host PC, with a network.)
One thing all of these mobile devices, and others, have in common is that they are likely to hold information that may be useful to the enterprise. Unfortunately, however, there currently exists no feasible solution for searching such devices for relevant data. One workaround for this problem is to synchronize the data on the mobile device with a networked computer, such as a PC, a file server, or the like. This synchronized data, then, may be searched using an enterprise search service.
This workaround, suffers several drawbacks. First, it requires additional configuration of the device and therefore additional administrative overhead. Second, it is difficult to ensure that the “synchronized” data is in fact synchronized, and that the copies of the files, etc. on the networked computer are as current as those on the mobile device. Third, there is a significant likelihood that the synchronization will be incomplete, meaning that there are files or other information on the mobile device that have not been copied to the networked computer. Finally, many mobile devices (including, as one particular example, wireless phones) feature limited (or no) data synchronization capabilities, meaning that such devices are essentially left out of the enterprise search net.
Hence, it would be useful if there were some facility that provided the ability to search the mobile devices themselves for data matching an enterprise search query.